On 14-02-09 06:41 PM, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>   Yeah, it's
> handy, but creating home directories on first login is actually a
> Linux PAM issue, not  a Samba/AD issue per se.
Quite true, it's PAM that takes care of creating the home directories.  
It's a package deal -- the combination of AD authentication and PAM 
automatically creating home directories means we don't need to provision 
accounts.  As students can make a last minute course change and then 
show up in our lab expecting to be able to login it's a win-win!
> Hmm. Sun Ray is hampered by the attempt to run X servers on a thin
> client. X is.... bandwidth and resource greedy, which is one reason
> that graphical "thin clients" hae never worked well for UNIX and Linux
That hasn't been our experience, but it could have been a different 
story if we had been running more graphics intensive applications. The 
problem is that the Sun Ray technology has been dead ended since Oracle 
bought Sun and the reality is that most of our courses are using Windows 
based applications.  We switched one of our two teaching labs back to 
being pc based last year, but this time we opted to use a standard 
Windows student image (with some modifications) supported by our central 
computing department.  We're now trying to move to a VDI based service 
using Dell Wyse Zero Clients on the desktop.

Lest anyone thing we're moving to become a Windows only department, it's 
a different story in our Graduate computing lab.  There we have two 
Windows based machines but everything else is running Ubuntu. We also 
have a significant number of faculty who run Linux based machines in 
their offices.

Our philosophy is to use the solution that is best for our users, which 
could be either Linux or Windows based.